[In the following essay, originally published in 1952, Bottrall, a well-known English poet, positively reflects upon Pound's body of work, believing “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” to be his artistic peak, and that his later work, while still excellent, did not live up to his earlier potential.]

During the last twelve months or so in addition to a collection of essays on Ezra Pound, there have appeared the collected edition of the first 70 Cantos; a volume of Pound's letters, edited by D. D. Paige; and a full-length study of Pound's poetry by Hugh Kenner. All this does honour to a neglected writer and is an encouraging riposte to the attacks made by large sections of the American press on Pound and the judges who awarded him the Bollingen Prize. But I sense in a good deal of the criticism the hushed atmosphere of the cult, and this I cannot believe that Pound himself would welcome. He has always been a plain speaker and a hard hitter.

In an essay that appeared in the Dial in January 1928, T. S. Eliot wrote: ‘I cannot think of anyone writing verse, of our generation and the next, whose verse (if any good) has not been improved by the study of Pound's.’ This has always puzzled me. A generation is usually taken to be about thirty-five years. Let us assume that a literary generation is fifteen years; even then I can think of hardly anyone born about 1900 who was in 1927 exemplifying the influence of Pound; Allen Tate's is, indeed, the only name that comes into my mind. If Eliot was speaking prophetically, he was still off the track. The new generation which began to write in England in 1928-29—Auden, Spender, Day Lewis and Empson—were fertilized by Donne, Hopkins, Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Laura Riding and Eliot himself, not Pound.

In 1929, however, when I was teaching in Finland and trying to learn to write verse, F. R. Leavis recommended me to read Eliot's selection of Pound's poems and to give special attention to ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’. I can never be sufficiently grateful for this advice. As I read ‘Mauberley’ and I saw, or thought I saw, how contemporary verse should be written, I worked through Pound's poetry and I tried to discover how he had arrived at the perfection of ‘Mauberley’. His poetic progress seemed to me to be a movement from unnecessarily simplified imagist statement to unnecessarily complicated ellipsis. ‘Mauberley’, ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, and the early Cantos come at a point of equilibrium in this progress. About ‘Mauberley’ Leavis and Hugh Kenner have written admirably. It will be sufficient here if I draw attention to the superlatively controlled rhythms, the delicate irony and the exquisite modulations of tone in this great poem. Kenner has rightly pointed out that Mauberley is not a self-portrait, but a persona with whom Pound would wish not to be confounded. This reading strengthens the ironies of the poem and re-emphasises its suppleness and subtlety.

The early poems lead up to ‘Propertius’ and ‘Mauberley’. The methods of these two poems, superimposed, lead to the Cantos. The principal difficulties confronting any reader of the Cantos are to make out the pattern of the poem and to keep in mind the appearances and re-appearances of certain basic characters, incidents, attitudes and phrases. Pound's later writing is remarkable for his use of ellipse in syntax and image and for the bareness of his phrasing. The surface simplicity of the Cantos is full of pitfalls, and the connection between an incident and an image, presumably evident to Pound himself, too often fails to penetrate to the reader. Events and persons of trivial or ephemeral importance are introduced at random in language charged with very little poetic pressure; such references can only be justified if they are supported by adequate tension in the verse or by being clearly placed in the thematic pattern of the poem. Pound's frequent failure (or refusal) to provide the tension or the referential nexus cannot fail to be a source of irritation to many readers.

Although Pound has modestly called them ‘a poem of some length,’ the Cantos are persistently referred to by his idolaters as an epic poem. What is an epic? A conventional definition would be, ‘a poem celebrating, in the form of a continuous narrative, the achievements of one or more heroic personages of history or tradition.’ In short, the Heroic Poem, of which Dryden in his Dedication to the Aeneid says, ‘The design of it is to form the mind to heroic virtue by example … the action of it is always one, entire and great.’ Whatever Pound's intentions are, this is far removed from the actual achievement of the Cantos, of which the fine Greek poet George Seferis has said that ‘never perhaps has poetic material been collected so indiscriminately.’ The Cantos, in fact, may more usefully be likened to a series of confessions, either in propria persona or through the persona, or mask, of characters, fictitious, living or dead. Like most confessions, they are involved, anecdotal, misleading and repetitive.

Eliot has not helped matters by contending that as we go on reading the Cantos we become habituated to Pound's methods as we have become habituated to Joyce's by re-reading of Ulysses. Joyce has written something far nearer an epic than Pound. Difficult as Ulysses was at a first reading, the figure of Ulysses-Bloom stood out clearly and we could work out an exegesis from this starting point. No exegesis that I have read can persuade me that because Pound starts off by translating sixty lines of a Latin version of the Odyssey, and refers to Odysseus from time to time throughout the Cantos, he has achieved an epic and an ordered work of art. We soon leave the sea and become bogged down, not so much by allusions as by the ellipses, the interruptions, the failure to knit together the basic themes, as Joyce so triumphantly knitted his. Every detail in his Ulysses is relevant to the main themes; for Pound, the digression, the anecdote (preferably glossed in a foreign language) is the fatal Cleopatra for which he will gladly sacrifice an epic. In Canto XIII Kung (Confucius) says:

Anyone can run to excesses
It is easy to shoot past the mark,
It is hard to stand in the middle.

It is hard and it is just what Pound cannot do.

Pound is still the old-style optimist, the believer in the good society, which is just around the corner, ready to hand if we only get rid of the financiers and the armament manufacturers and restore order. His own personal tragedy, even, has not brought home to him that he has only scratched the surface of evil, never looked into its depths. He has a bewildered sense of human waste and corruption, but no tragic sense of the human predicament. Pound is very ready to consign people he does not like to their appropriate place in his private inferno. But he himself (apart from some strangely humble passages in The Pisan Cantos) is buoyantly and confidently free from self-criticism. It is, surely, a very unreal hell that only houses the ‘others;’ the only hell that matters in art or religion is the one where one is and where, but for the grace of God, one will remain. If Pound reaches Paradise in the Cantos it will be an earthly paradise.

In his later poetry and in all his criticism Pound (like Browning, from whom he learnt a good deal) sets out to convince. In the Cantos he too often presents particular instances of ‘ideas in action,’ conduct, taste, or artistic creation, to exemplify those general laws which he himself has postulated a priori. Only rarely does he allow his instances to develop organically and enrich his poetic pattern; he prefers to set them down baldly as a re-inforcement of his dogmatic assumptions. He is primarily concerned with opinions and events, not human relationships, and this devitalises his later work. The strange argument put forward by Eliot to excuse Pound's reiteration of his idées fixes is that he writes so well: ‘No-one living … can write like this: how many can be named, who can write half as well.’ In fact, his rôles of impresario and teacher all too often bedevil the poetry. Pound has from the beginning impressed on his disciples that poetry should be as well written as prose. After a recent re-reading of 82 Cantos I can but wish that the opaque mass of much of the American history and the economics had been even half as well written as the prose of Swift.

This is not to say that we are not all in the debt of this great practitioner of verse, or that I do not admire the finest passages of the Cantos. What I am trying to re-affirm is what I said in an essay written early in 1933, one of the first lengthy appraisals of A Draft of XXX Cantos, that Pound has suffered more from his admirers than his detractors. Pound's healthy and exuberant love of the arts, his just contempt for academic reputations, his fine sensibility, his acute nose for worthwhile things lost in the byways of literature, his untiring search after the best modes of expression—these have fired his advocates to declare that he has a better understanding of Chinese poetry than Arthur Waley and a more profound insight into the writings of Cavalcanti than the greatest living Italian poet, Eugenio Montale. We may not have long to wait before some neophyte unearths, with a murmur of approval, Ernest Hemingway's judgment of 1925 that Pound is the major poet and Eliot the minor one. Pound, probably rightly, is credited with having been the principal influence in causing Yeats to change his poetic style. This affords a useful ground for comparison. After ‘Mauberley’, Pound might have gone on writing as finely as in this poem, where he matches, even surpasses, the later Yeats; but he did not, and in my opinion ‘Among School Children’ and the two ‘Byzantium’ poems are greater than any Canto or any part of any Canto. However much they may have owed to Pound, it is Yeats and Eliot who write the exquisitely-organised, the greatest poetry after 1920, and not Pound himself.

This fact has been obscured by the authority of Eliot who has dubbed Pound ‘il miglior fabbro.’ Eliot rightly insists that it is on his total work for literature that Pound must be judged: ‘on his poetry, and his criticism, and his influence on men and on events at a turning point in literature.’ Judged by these criteria, Pound is a major figure. It has been to me an exhilarating experience to read the new collection of his letters and to re-read his criticism. Both are so salty and full of bite. Pound's incursions into European art, literature and music have a vigorous, buccaneering quality reminiscent of the condottieri he admired. Rummaging among the spoils he plunders here a poet, there a painter—the pirate from the New World is re-dressing and re-painting the Old. Make it New! It is all done with a racy exuberance and, much more important, a singleness of heart and a generosity of mind, which are without parallel in modern times.

It may possibly be objected that in all this I have emphasised many of the stale and profitless criticisms of Pound that have helped in the past to obscure his merits. If so, there can be found in Hugh Kenner's study an answer to every censure. He has, with remarkable patience and erudition, surveyed the whole of Pound's poetry and carefully related it to Pound's critical dicta. He is well-grounded in his subject and can cite instances at all points to support his main thesis, which is that the Cantos are the culmination of Pound's work and form an ordered whole. He begins by saying that Pound is a far more important figure than Browning or Landor and that Donne's experiments in rhythm are ‘kindergarten material beside the strategic audacities of the later Cantos.’ Later he states that ‘much of Pound's poetic organisation … is essentially similar to Wordsworth's.’ We begin to be suspicious. It would be equally unhelpful, and not less true, to say that much of Pound's poetic organisation was essentially similar to Byron's. Soon it is clear that Kenner is speaking to a brief and that the brief is to defend every line that Pound has written and every sentiment that he has uttered. Briefly, he sees the Cantos as a ‘timeless bas-relief’ in which ‘a complex intellectual drama is enacted’. They are a ‘multi-dimensional construction’ going back behind the Cartesian philosophy to purify language and assert the importance of the work or the thing against the idea. The tension of the writing is provided by typographical signs; the principal technique is the ‘ideogrammic method,’ which enables ‘rare accesses of insight and emotion’ to be apprehended in the same way as the ‘invisible fields of force surrounding the magnet can be apprehended through the behaviour of multitudinous particles of iron.’ We become more suspicious. We finally gather that in the Cantos Pound is seeking to establish ‘a hierarchy of values,’ though ‘everything may be said to be as important as everything else.’ This is another way of saying that nothing in them is important.

Pound has a dangerous attraction for the young critic; he is the field of force that draws the susceptible iron filings. It is very tempting to try to prove that he is always right. But let us examine two or three of Kenner's remarks. At one point he talks of the three last pages of Canto LXXX as providing ‘an ideogram of specifically English culture’; at another he states that one need not know the languages that Pound quotes—‘even when we can't read them, their very inscrutability performs half their poetic function’—and that ‘anyone can feel the play of silent cryptic finality in a Chinese ideogram … without knowing what the ideogram means.’ Anyone can see that the second and third remarks are pretentious nonsense, but the first is little better. Pound's acquaintance with Chinese literature, Kenner and others maintain, has enabled him to evolve a new technique of expression, the ‘ideogrammic form.’ What is an ideogram? It is a character symbolising the idea of a thing, in contrast to the word that names it; it is a graphic symbol. Pound's poetry is full of images, so is that of Keats; but both poets express their images in words, not in hieroglyphics. How then can three pages of words form an ideogram of a culture?

Pound is careless and it does not do to have an answer ready every time. In 1933 I noticed that in Canto XVIII Pound spelt Khan as ‘Kahn’ and (rather convincingly, I thought) I wrote that this ‘spelling … links Kubla with the family of bankers and the Morgan firm.’ Imagine my chagrin on noticing at a recent re-reading that in the new Faber edition of the Cantos the mis-spelling had vanished. This kind of thing makes a good deal of Hugh Kenner's ingenuity pointless. In a letter to Carlo Izzo in 1938, Pound wrote: ‘“Praedis.” I don't care how you spell your wop painters, and I don't know whether A.P. was from Predi, Predo or Predis. Never been to his home town.’ I too had been puzzled by the continual error of Ambrogio de Praedis in the Cantos. Now I understand. Pound didn't care.

After this niggling interlude, I must sum up Pound's positive achievements as impresario, teacher, critic and poet. He discovered T. S. Eliot and arranged for the first publication of his verse. It was through his influence that Joyce's Portrait of the Artist and parts of Ulysses were published. His example in verse and his critical precepts were crucial in the formation of Eliot's style and that of the later Yeats. His exploration of history and his experiments in rhythm have left a permanent mark on English poetry. ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ is one of the greatest poems of our time. Last, and perhaps most important, he is a man who has disinterestedly and selfishly devoted his life to poetry and the art of writing.